I like to send little notes in my kid’s lunches, but “I love you, have a good day” gets old after a while. For my youngest, I send corny jokes instead. But I found the perfect thing for my 11-year-old: a pencil-and-paper game of Battleship.
If you’ve ever played Battleship in its now-iconic tabletop form, you know that you start by placing little toy ships on a grid. Your opponent does the same, on a separate grid, out of your sight. Next, you take turn calling out coordinates to each other, trying to sink each other’s ships. “J-10!” you might say. “Miss!” they call back. You mark the hits and misses on a second, blank grid. The object of the game is to sink all of their ships before they sink yours.
If it doesn’t take much imagination to convert Battleship to paper, that’s because that’s actually how it was originally played. The first commercially-sold versions of the game were pads of paper, printed with grids. You would mark your ships in pencil, and then you and your friend take turns shouting coordinates to each other. So you can use this same basic setup to send a game of Battleship in your kid’s lunchbox—or play it on pen and paper any time you want.
How to play Battleship with a pencil and paper
For the traditional two-player version, each player needs two 10 x 10 grids. You can print some, or make your own by drawing lines on paper. Label the columns 1 through 10, and the rows A through J. This way, you can identify a square with its letter and number. The top left square is A-1, and the bottom right square is J-10.
Next, on one grid, place your ships. The lineup Hasbro uses in the physical game is as follows (but feel free to change it if you prefer; just make sure both players know what ships they’re ultimately trying to sink):
Aircraft carrier: 5 squares
Battleship: 4 squares
Cruiser: 3 squares
Submarine: 3 squares (yes, there are two ships this size)
Destroyer: 2 squares
You can put the ships anywhere, horizontally or vertically. (No diagonals.) You can do this by shading those squares lightly in pencil.
The other grid is for you to keep track of your opponent’s ships. Take turns shooting at each other. Here’s how each turn goes:
You call out a coordinate (for example: “B-9”).
They say whether it was a hit or a miss.
You mark it on your second grid (I like to use a dot for a miss, an X for a hit). You’ll want to mark both hits and misses because even the misses help you figure out where the ships are.
Next, it’s their turn! They call out a coordinate.
You look at your ships and tell them whether it was a hit or a miss.
Mark hits on your own ships, so you’ll be able to tell your opponent when they have sunk a ship. (You don’t need to track their misses.)
When a ship has been hit in every square, tell them “You sank my...” and give the name of the ship. For example, when the battleship has taken four hits, you can utter the iconic words “You sank my battleship!”
How to play a one-sided game of Battleship on paper (via lunch notes)
For my son, we only do the side of the game he can “win.” So I have the ships, which I keep secret, and he’s guessing coordinates. (You could do it with two grids, just like the above, but this was simpler for us.)
On an index card, I made a little grid, and I gave him space to guess three coordinates each day. On the back of the card, I have a list of the five ships, as above, so that I can cross each one off when he sinks it.
For my side of the game, I took a screenshot of one of those Battleship grids, and I used the Instagram stories tool to scribble in the location of my five ships (but you could use any image program that allows drawing).
Every morning, I open up that image on my phone, and I look at his three guesses on the card. On the paper grid, I mark misses as dots and hits as X’s (and I color the X’s with a highlighter, if I have one handy.) Next to his guesses, I say whether each was a hit or miss. So far, he’s sunk two of my ships, and he tells me he looks forward to the game every day.